Firestorm Labs raises $82M Series A to put mobile drone factories at the edge of the battlefield

Speaker 2: to have the data center capacity to support Yeah. The level of like concurrent activity that they have on the platform. Yeah. And,

Speaker 1: I'm very excited to see what they do. Yeah. Roblox is doing well. He's cooking. Well, we have our next guest in the waiting room. We have Dan from Firestorm. He's the co founder and CEO. Dan, how are you doing?

Speaker 13: What's up, boys? How are doing? We're doing great. Firestorm.

Speaker 1: Take us through an introduction on yourself, your the company. Can you do that, like, 10 more times throughout this interview, please?

Speaker 13: You and and online. That's a good one. We don't use that one enough. Anyway, sorry. Introduce yourself, the company, and what you're standing in front of. Sure. My name is Dan Majee, and I am cofounder and CEO of Firestorm. We're based out of San Diego, about a 150 people. And our whole vision is to reinvent and transform how we build drones. Mhmm. And what does that mean? First, it starts with advanced manufacturing. Mhmm. So a lot of the drones we buy as a country cost more than a Ferrari and you use them one time. We think that's, you know, not economically feasible in the long run. And then the second thing is you gotta be able to move this manufacturing to the point of need. And so behind me, you have a couple of our products, the Tempest Mhmm. As well as the Xcel, which I'm gonna give you guys a tour of here Cool. In a couple minutes. That's awesome. Yeah. When did you when did you start the company? We started it in '22. My background was I started a counter UAS company in 2015. Naval special warfare, the seals found us and took us to Iraq to fight ISIS when a lot of the big prime solutions didn't work. And I watched how ISIS was able to use off the shelf low cost drones to effectively fight us to a standstill until the counter UAS systems came in. And in the build up to the war in Ukraine, I was thinking, why don't we have this type of technology? And it started with, again, rethinking the manufacturing process first, and now it's evolved into actually moving the factory closer to the battlefield.

Speaker 1: So, I mean, it feels like the the product is the factory, but do you have a first party drone design, or do you wanna purely partner on that side? Someone else comes to you with their spec, and then you modify your factory to be able to churn them out.

Speaker 13: We we do both. Right? But the intention from the beginning is to actually build the drones you see behind us. These are our designs. And then we have a number of partnerships with, like, FPV providers that'll show you inside Sure. Some of the most used drones in the war in Ukraine. Now we're not using Chinese carbon fiber. We're literally turning powder into the airframes, and you can go do that anywhere. Yeah. And the other part of that too is to repair drones. That's something no one talks about. It's actually fixing stuff when it breaks in the field. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Well, I'd love to see what's inside one of those factories.

Speaker 1: I'm I'm interested in the types of machinery and materials that are going into this. Can you take us inside? Does the camera move? Is that possible? Oh, the the camera moves. We have two humans moving it. Let's do it. Let's go inside. Start here at the drone. I'm honestly a little disappointed. I was hoping it was a it was a drone. A drone, baby. A drone flying it? Yeah. I think with a fixed wing it'd be going way too fast. I'm that good of a pilot. You know what I mean? So I don't wanna like crash into anything.

Speaker 13: So we've designed everything from modularity. Right? This this whole air airframe is three d printed. You have a rail that runs through the drone so you can put payloads in and out with ease. So if something breaks or you wanna change the mission on the go, you have that ability to. And then in the back, we have both a propeller variant and then a jet variant that I'm gonna show you over here. And the whole idea is like add modularity at every essence of the drone, not just build something for one mission. You know what I mean? Yeah. Okay. So come on into the Excel. Okay.

Speaker 1: The Excel.

Speaker 13: So our whole adventure starts with this right here. Yeah. This is our build box. Okay. Think of this as like your print cartridge. Okay? So this is on wheels as you see. And so you basically wheel this into the processing station, which is right here. Mhmm. It slides right in. Okay? Mhmm. You then fill it up with powder from our new and our recycled powder, so we're highly efficient, right, from a volume standpoint. Once the build box is full of powder, you then push it into the printer. Yeah. And we have an exclusive arrangement with HP. This is kind of the best in class industrial grade three d printing. Like, parts that come out of this machine are on f one race cars. Wow. And if you wanna have this printer in a mobile fashion, you have to come to us. That's kind of the IP we've built around this. Right? Mhmm. So this is a 20 foot shipping container and the sides fold down to then allow you to, like, you know, have the workspace you have. Sure. So once it's done printing, you let it cool down, and then you put it back in gear, and you're left with parts like this. Right? You suck the extra powder out Yep. And then you take it into the second 20 foot shipping container that I'm gonna show you right now where you just simply blow these parts with powder. Yeah. I'm sorry. With air, and you have a finished part.

Speaker 1: This looks like some post apocalyptic I know. Biore security safety. Like, zombie apocalypse, I know where I'm going.

Speaker 13: Exactly. Yeah. So, literally, you just come in here. Yep. You you blow air on the part. Yep. And and you're done. Wow. And so what we use the second container for is actually assembly and r and d. Mhmm. So I'll show you some of the other stuff besides our platforms we're making. Yeah. You were asking a minute ago about, like, other people's designs. Yeah. So we have a partnership with a company called Orca. Okay. They're out of Croatia. About 300,000 of these drones were delivered to the Ukrainians last year. Mhmm. We've gotten rid of all the carbon fiber, which, you know, no one wants to talk about usually comes from China. Mhmm. And we've replaced it with our powder based solution. Mhmm. You can assemble this thing in thirteen minutes. And if something breaks, great. You just burn a new piece out and, you know, you do a new installation. And why is that important, guys? Because because some of these drone companies, it's taking them three to four weeks to deliver repair parts to the field, and that just means the system's basically unusable. So we started as this mobile drone factory. We started sending this thing to bases around the country and overseas. And then this is where the business got really, really interesting. You guys have talked a lot, I'm sure, about the defense industrial base. Okay? And the amount of things the soldiers are telling us they need that we're now printing, like, is is incredible. Yeah. So this is an engine coolant tank. Alright? You should be able to go to Pep Boys and buy this. This is a ten month lead time product. Wow. For That is absurd. What kind of engine? It goes on an LTV. So like a marine corps vehicle. Oh, okay. Like you think we would have these supplies, but the issue is that one, OEMs have consolidated. Yeah. Two, no one wants to build kind of parts. Mhmm. And so if you look at what the the Trump administration has really spent a lot of time and energy talking about is this idea of right to repair. We know that from the tech world. Right? Of course. Like your iPhone. But, like, now it's actually coming in to the OD. And we wanna use the Excel not only to build drones, but to enable some of that repair stuff. Right? Mhmm. So one other one I'll tell you, and you'll love this one as a taxpayer in in America. Mhmm. This holds a GPS antenna. Okay? Sits right Yeah. It's on basically every ground vehicle in the in in in our military. Sure. It's really really flimsy. And if it breaks, the person who makes the antenna does not make this repair Okay. Part. So a bunch of marines thought of this idea. And so now you don't have to buy a brand new $2,500 antenna. Yeah. You simply print a $2 part. Wow. It's amazing. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's incredible. I'll back out and I love it. Oh, there we go. I love the sound effects.

Speaker 1: Here we go. Look at this. Very cool. So that's it. Amazing. Amazing. Tell us about the round. Yeah. Us about the round. How's it going there? There's some news. So we just raised $82,000,000

Speaker 13: led by Washington Harbor for series a. There we go. Congratulations. Thank you. Joined by Omnis Capital Yeah. Our friends at Liquidity

Speaker 2: Oh, no. Geodesic Cool.

Speaker 13: The Motley Fool. Like, we have a lot of awesome investors joining us. But our big thing now is to take the Xcel not only to, like, you know, execute on the contracts we've won

Speaker 1: Yeah. Including most recently an AppFit contract for thirty million dollars. But start taking the XL overseas. This is really gonna support The US and its allies, like, around the world. Very, very cool. Well, thank you so much for giving us the tour. Thanks for coming Incredible tour. Incredible tour. These are not easy to pull off. They're not easy. Great. We appreciate it. Hey. Have a great rest of day. Those two Yeah. To the team that was carrying the camera. I think it's the on the bus. I can Yeah. Great to meet you. Have a great day. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Dan. Goodbye. See you, boys. Up next,